00:00Back in November we got together a bunch of students of composition and local poets and we put them in
00:06a room and had this mad creative speed dating event which is always really good fun, it's very very high
00:12octane and at the end of the day we have 10 breeding pairs who then go off and lay this
00:17perfect egg which is a 3-4 minute song for voice and piano, it's performed by the young artists who
00:23are just amazing new performers, they're at the start of their careers and they each have a song sort of
00:29given to them.
00:30And this time for the first time we've also paired visual art with that so that's been another fantastic dimension
00:35so it's just an explosion of creativity.
00:38Normally as a composer you get to choose the poet's text that you work with and in this it's so
00:44different both because there is the part of the brief that says these have to be poems about people from
00:50Leeds and also this has to be from the poet you've been allocated to work with and that's a really
00:57different way of working for a composer, it's quite a challenging way of working for a composer,
00:59working for a composer in some ways, but it's also I think a really exciting limitation or restriction on what
01:06you're doing that in many ways seems I think for most of the young composers to lead to much more
01:12imaginative creative responses.
01:14I think even though I'm a doctoral student I think as a student you sometimes are within a bit of
01:20a bubble and I think it's really quite special to build artistic community across different kind of maybe demographics that
01:29wouldn't conventionally make work together.
01:33There's something in the act of communal listening that is very bonding and I think especially now when everything feels
01:45rather fragmented to feel that kind of togetherness through art is very healing.
01:54I am a big advocate for inter-deceptionary practice and overall mixing music, poetry, art and any artistic discipline with
02:05the purpose of just creating more something else, something new and I think there is so much to learn from
02:12seeing other people create in their own way.
02:14I think it's also really productive to have that relationship between poets, composers and now visual artists precisely because we
02:23so often don't work with one another and the conversations that take place so often are the realisation that the
02:28issues with making work and with finding audiences for those pieces of work are exactly the same.
02:35We're wanting to take what could be seen as a slightly esoteric tradition from the German romantic movement maybe and
02:44say what are we doing in 2026 which is still art song but it's completely accessible, the subjects of these
02:51songs are physically in the room and they've been able to have this process of a dialogue with the people
02:56who've written and made the music and the people who are performing it.
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